59 strat pickup

[Mark Hammer]

We seem to believe that people at "that" time (and "that time" can vary with the technology one happens to be talking about) knew all the things we know about now, but somehow deliberately declined to pass them on, so we had to learn them all over again on our own and begin applying them. Given how often one sees practices in institutions become informally entrenched but NEVER written down, that's plausible I suppose.

More likely, though, people get minimally informed (at least in any conscious, theory-driven way) hunches about what "works" and stick with it. All the peculiar qualities of the Cremona violin-makers have been studied extensively, and I even recall an article in Scientific American years ago with electron-microscope pictures of the effect of the varnish on wood tissue in a Cremona violin. So, um, if the very instrument makers themselves had none of this technology to analyse their methods, and didn't live particularly long lives to be able to see variations in performance over times and productions runs, just what did they base their methods on? Hunches and folk wisdom and "This is how you do X" dictums from the old farts, I suppose. And maybe simple expediency.

It's a bit like thinking that migrating geese somehow have protected knowledge of their flight patterns, and know where they're going. They don't. They do something as individuals that results, by chance, in collective patterns that get them from here to there in remarkable fashion. But they don't "know" what they're doing and have no maps in their head. They just get lucky, and because it's so damn remarkable we think there must have been purpose and design behind it.

I think the description of a bunch of minimally skilled factory-workers gabbing and winding to some pre-ordained minimally-thought-out production spec is probably pretty apt. Keep in mind that our notion of what guitar ought to sound like comes from what we heard first. THEY, in turn, had absolutely no benchmark to guide them in attaining what they thought a pickup ought to sound like. They made what they made...and years later, for a whole host of reasons, we thought it was pretty good. Unfortunately, since they weren't being especially systematic about it and never really formalized their methods and wrote them down, AND we liked it, we're stuck with having to figure it out decades later after the critical parties have died.

[Spence]

Just look at any photo of Abigail Ybarra and you'll see a look of bewilderment on her face. That's because she just can't believe how so many people could be suckered in by Fender hype over something she did years ago without giving it a thought. My personal favourite is the photo of Seymour Duncan 'supervising' her. I would imagine they both cringed when they saw that press shot.

[MattT]

And maybe simple expediency.

I think this is BIG. Just put yourself in an unskilled workers shoes...you just want to wind the damn things and not have the wire break or any other problems that might slow you down. The winders probably just did whatever worked and was the easiest.

I'm too lazy to look for good new music so I decided to go backwards and 'discover' some of the older stuff (plus I'm getting older too...approaching 50 fast). I recently got some John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Thelonius Monk, Kenny Burrel...and Vivaldi . It's all new to me but it's all really, really good. I think next I'm gonna go to one of the earliest pioneers...Charlie Christain.

[David Schwab]

So, um, if the very instrument makers themselves had none of this technology to analyse their methods, and didn't live particularly long lives to be able to see variations in performance over times and productions runs, just what did they base their methods on? Hunches and folk wisdom and "This is how you do X" dictums from the old farts, I suppose. And maybe simple expediency.

Very thoughtful post Mark.

There was a recent article (I forget where), that talked about some studies done that showed that following hunches often works better than sitting and trying to figure out something. Where the information comes from, well we haven't even started to think about that, except for people like Dr. Rupert Sheldrake, and the overly skeptical witch hunt that is modern science goes out of its way to debunk anything we can't test using scientific method... even though you need to have a theory of how something works before you can test it, so if you don't know something exists, you can't test for it! This is why things are accidentally discovered.

So sometimes you just have to follow your gut feeling, even if that makes no sense!

You see a lot of old beliefs in old guitars and amps. Many of the pioneers had no real electronics training... George Beauchamp, Leo Fender, etc. Beauchamp thought you needed to run the strings through the magnet! Some old pickups had the strings going through the coil. They went with common circuits and ideas. You see a lot of old electric guitars with metal pickguards or assemblies holding the pickups, or entire metal guitars, because they thought that was necessary. Look at the Tele bridge/pickup setup, with the ashtray cover! That's overkill as far as shielding. But that's how things were done back then. Old amps look like old radios.

Now it's the same 50 year old stuff rehashed over and over, until you get something like the Lace Transsensor or Alumitone. And those came from people not in the guitar business.

It's a bit like thinking that migrating geese somehow have protected knowledge of their flight patterns, and know where they're going. They don't. They do something as individuals that results, by chance, in collective patterns that get them from here to there in remarkable fashion. But they don't "know" what they're doing and have no maps in their head. They just get lucky, and because it's so damn remarkable we think there must have been purpose and design behind it.

Birds learn things like songs from their parents. So each goose is following a path set up a long time ago by other geese. Of course then you have new patterns set. The Canada Geese we have in New Jersey no longer migrate, because they were born here.

And how do birds know which direction they are heading in anyway?

And how do butterflies do those long migrations?

But we also have the stories about dogs travailing hundreds of miles to find their owners, even though they have never been to the location they are going.

I think they are all a lot smarter than we give them credit for.

There's so much we don't know, and it's a shame that many scientists are becoming very closed minded. I like to point out that my dad was born in 1900. He grew up with no electricity, no incandescent lights, no refrigeration, no airplanes, No TV, no automobiles, etc, etc, and then in 1969, when he was 69, he saw them land on the moon!

That's a BIG jump in less than one lifetime. It's like the bone to the monolith in 2001!

[David Schwab]

I'm too lazy to look for good new music so I decided to go backwards and 'discover' some of the older stuff (plus I'm getting older too...approaching 50 fast). I recently got some John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Thelonius Monk, Kenny Burrel...and Vivaldi . It's all new to me but it's all really, really good. I think next I'm gonna go to one of the earliest pioneers...Charlie Christain.

The old music is always a good place to start. My wife is only 32, but she's been listening to Coltrane and Davis for many years.

Check out Django Reinhardt. Not electric guitar, but electrifying! And played with only two good fingers on his fretting hand.

You have to have roots. Many younger musician's roots only go back to the 90's. If you go back to the 60's, and then check out who Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page, Eric Clapton, etc., listened to, and then check out who those influences listened to, then you have some musical knowledge.

I've always been a very non traditional bass player... blame that on hearing Jack Bruce on the live Cream recordings... but in every note I play there's some Bach as much as some Jamerson and McCartney.

[David Schwab]

Do you reckon these women winders had any training like " just sit there chatting and look out of the window , just move the wire left and right till you have 8000 winds? don't worry about any kind of pattern , they will be fine , 50 years from now people will love them ,
I would think that they were made so much better back then and pulling one apart just confirmed it....thats why they sound so good..modern stuff can't compete with old stuff , it's a fact..

Mick

My mom was a factory working in her 40's. Before that she was just a singer... But when she got married and moved from NYC to suburbia (NJ) with my dad, she got a job in a sequin factory. She learned to use a few different machines, that looked as crazy as the Leesona. She was trained how to thread up the thing, etc., and was good at running it. Beyond that she couldn't tell you a thing on the how and why it worked. They called it "the slung".

Incidentally, for those interested in some tragically unique US history, this factory was in one of the two buildings originally owned by the US Radium Corp. The main building being next door.

Read the Wikipedia article on the Radium Girls

My mom had to be tested a few times after they figured out that the site was dangerous. Explains why I glow in the dark..

[Possum]

....

I wouldn't be so sour on science, as it IS turning around rapidly in alot of ways. The quantum physics thing is gaining wide acceptance and mind over matter has been proven in the lab many times and is kind of old hat now. Medecine is changing slowly but surely. It is frustrating to see people die from cancer treatments who refuse to investigate altnerative methods that are generally more successful, or such bogus entities as the American Cancer Society etc. who basically think some magical poisonous drug is going to "cure" cancer etc. But there is alot of change happening in the world for the better. Whether the bad guys will take us into total destruction before sanity prevails is the big question. Obviously the sane people are not the ones in control or we surely wouldnt be driving antiquated technology automobiles running on gasoline soley because alternatives have been suppressed by those who are getting obscenely rich selling oil. We have come a long way in alot of respects, like we dont burn people at the stake because they threaten the power of the church anymore, but it sure wouldn't take much to fall back into that level of sub human civilization either. The stuff that goes on in Africa that white civiilization doesn't seem to care about shows that we have a long way to go. I am hoping that some kind of critical mass thing happens soon that will send the bad guys wailing out into the desert with no power, instead of running our lives for us like they do now. Humanity has alot of potential, and needs to wake up, I hope it happens, there is always hope...

[David Schwab]

I wouldn't be so sour on science, as it IS turning around rapidly in alot of ways. The quantum physics thing is gaining wide acceptance and mind over matter has been proven in the lab many times and is kind of old hat now. Medecine is changing slowly but surely.

It all depends on what you read. I do read the more progressive things, but there's this huge skeptic movement going on. Just check out some of the Science Podcasts on iTunes. They don't accept the countless cases of UFO sightings and photographs and videos, let along the thousands of people reporting alien abduction phenomena. Dr. Rupert Sheldrake did many positive experiments on ESP, and ESP in dogs (knowing when their owners are returning home) but was thrown out of Harvard, and has idiots like Michael Shermer and james Randy, who wont even look at the data, and just want to debunk things they don't accept. They say the methods used in testing are wrong, but don't see that some things just can't be tested using the current standard scientific method, if you have no understanding of the underlying mechanism involved in a phenomena, you can't devise a test for it! It's like trying to figure out a candle flame by isolating it from its environment... let's stick it in a bell jar and suck the air out. Oh, where did the flame go?

I read a lot of science and astronomy web sites, and you even have people arguing that a lot of the advanced quantum physics stuff, like string theory is nonsense. And they get quite angry over it!

As a whole population of people are becoming enlightened, the mainstream scientists, are getting more dogmatic.

But yes, there are some people trying to really learn the truth behind our existence.

[Possum]

...

yeah, I love those debunker guys, they basically use Hitler's favorite ploy of claiming something is true or not, and repeating it over and over with a calm confident manner, like they know what they are talking about. Like Bush and the "terrorist threat." But if you examine those guys, you're right, they claim stuff like UFO's can't possibly be true because they don't think it is possible for other beings to exist, or if they did exist, they couldn't possibly make it to our planet because it would take too long (well by OUR primitive travel methods of course, duh...) to get here. these guys get national/world attention and they get off on showing us what big egos they have, and of course they deliver the "party line" so they are coming from a pretty safe stance. But they totally exist on the worst kind of faulty logic. It can't exist because THEY personally don't believe it can, so then the conclusion is that it just can't exist at all and should not be ever investigated by TRUE scientific inquiry. Basically they are clowns and disinformants, and alot of them in the UFO world are paid by the government to confuse the issues. The History Channel just ran some British program on UFOs, concluding that ALL UFO sightings EVER, in history are due to experimental secret aircraft. totally ridiculous conclusion when you consider mass sightings going back to Egyptian times and even earlier. there were airship crashes in this country even before airplanes were invented, I don't think Skunkworks had any projects going on back then, duh. Anyway, these kind of mindless dogma followers generally get rolled over by the tanks of progress as people grow in awareness, kinda like the McArthyism of the 50s, if you shout lies long enough people get tired of it and turn away.....

[mick]

Fascinating stuff guys , but do you reckon the woman who talked the most , paid the least amount of attention to winding or the one who was a bit more keen on her work wound the best pickups..?

Mick

[Ruel]

Hey Mick, now you got me thinking.... What about a lady in a foul mood, would she have come out with a killer pickup? Something that screamed like a banshee?

[mick]

Maybe Ruel , if she new what she was doing that is...maybe she would have gone out of her way to try make a crap one , just so any bloke playing it sounded shite?? then again given that apparently they didn't know what they were doing maybe that one would have turned out killer?? now I'm really confused..

Mick

PS hows things going ?? are you getting over here??

[David Schwab]

yeah, I love those debunker guys, they basically use Hitler's favorite ploy of claiming something is true or not, and repeating it over and over with a calm confident manner, like they know what they are talking about.

Oh they get worse than that. Then they attack the person making the claims. They can't touch the data, so they go after the person who compiled the data!

Like Bush and the "terrorist threat."

Let's just remember that the person in charge of security at the WTC, was... (drum roll please) Marvin Bush! Youngest son of George and Barbara. How very odd.

I don't care what anyone says.. on 9/11 I worked just blocks from the WTC, and my wife worked in one of the neighboring building. Another friend worked in the Tower 1 (Lehman Bros). She was getting coffee downstairs when the first plane hit.

Building 7 was not damaged by the planes, and was a bit too far to have been damaged by the towers collapse. All the building between WTC 7 and the towers were untouched. Yet WTC 7 fell down with a boom. If it had been wired up with explosives, it would have taken weeks of planning.

The BBC had a reporter on live TV announcing that building 7 had just collapsed, yet you could see it in the background, still standing, over her shoulder! But that's the announcement she was given to read... a bit premature I guess. You can find that video on YouTube.

Just google Marvin Bush for some interesting information, such as 9/11 Security Courtesy of Marvin Bush

Near the bottom of that page they have the quote:

"In the neighboring south tower people were also evacuating, but an announcement over the PA system tells them their building is secure and they can return to their desks..."

and a link about "Jackasses With Bullhorns: "WTC 2 is secure!"

I can attest that this is true. My wife was told to go back to her desk after the first tower came down. She refused and went running up the street.. one of those people you saw covered in white soot. She said there were a number of very loud explosions right before the towers came down.

I also knew a flight attendant on one of the planes and a firefighter that was never found. We must question the official story, because some things just don't add up.

But if you examine those guys, you're right, they claim stuff like UFO's can't possibly be true because they don't think it is possible for other beings to exist, or if they did exist, they couldn't possibly make it to our planet because it would take too long (well by OUR primitive travel methods of course, duh...) to get here.

Exactly. The thing is they are assuming they have to travel a great distance to get here. But they aren't. Evidence of that is that they have been here for thousands of years. it makes no sense to keep coming to a place over and over for that length of time. Even if they were coming here since the late 40's, that's still a long time and a lot of resources spent.

No, there's another answer that's too abstract for us to understand.

I'm reading a good book by Rick Strassman, MD, called "DMT the Spirit Molecule." Dr. Strassman started redoing research on psychedelics that was abandoned back in the 60's. He found that test subjects given control doses of DMT all have very similar experiences, including interacting with "intelligent nonhuman presences, especially 'aliens'" and insect looking beings. He said DMT is linked to the pineal gland, which is also considered by Hindus as the seventh chakra. His conclusion is that the things people experience on this drug are real, and need more study.

So they are really here all along... we just don't see them until they want us to. What does that mean, and why? That's the big question.

OK back to pickups... or not.

[Possum]

...

Yeah, the WTC thing is such an obvious choreographed drama, yet people in general think something like that is preposterous so they think anyone with a "conspiracy theory" is a nut case. Yet there are hundreds of witnesses who heard bombs go off in the BASEMENT of the first building RIGHT BEFORE the first plane hit. BOMBS going off BEFORE the buildings started to fall. And of course the building that fell that was never hit by anything, it just fell down of no apparent cause? If thats a conspiracy theory then who IS nuts? The video of the "plane" hitting the Pentagon, give me a break, where did that "thing" have time to get down a few feet above ground and fly straight in? If the video was even real, it was a mocked up missile if anything. The whole thing was staged to produce an effect and gain power for certain parties. You have to be pretty blind to not see that.

On the ET thing, this is such a huge indicator that we live in a controlled society and are told what to believe and are told to make ridicule of the alien thing. The real truth is they don't want anyone to know that we're not alone because the bad people in power are afraid of losing their power if there is open contact with intelligences higher than ours and who's motives aren't about greed, lies, and power. Well hopefully anyway, I"m sure there's some of them out there who are just as bad as the human trash who are destroying everything including the planet in lust for power and privelege. You probably know that the world is in a huge UFO flap, they are everywhere and alot of contact is happening. I have a friend who watches the skies in and around Portland alot and he sees them all the time. Maybe they are ours but how could the US have that many vehicles and keep it a secret, I don't think its possible. I would think these other beings are pushing more and more contact and visibility until one day they will all just appear in the skies and it won't be such a big surprise; alot of the bad people in power are going to have alot of hasty explaining to do then and I hope alot of them will be booted out of power in disgrace.

Pickups, oh yeah pickups......
but first this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOaSDRcPq-U

[greenfingers]

I want to believe

A lot of people who met and spent time with Jimi Hendrix believe he was an Alien, not of this Earth?. His large eye's and long fingers are a sign of his other-worldliness. Maybe he had pickups wound from strange materials not found in this galaxy by a Alien winder? The Roswell wrap anyone! Remember "the truth is out there" i just don't know where it is.